Everyone was gone.
He’d gotten the first man, Babcock, from Nevada. Others came from Arizona and Louisiana and Kentucky and Wyoming and Florida and Indiana and Delaware. Wolgast didn’t care much for those places, either. But anything was better than Texas.
Wolgast and Doyle had flown into Houston from Denver the night before. They’d stayed the night at a Radisson near the airport (he’d considered a brief side trip into the city, maybe tracking down his old house, but then wondered what in hell he’d want to do a thing like that for), picked up the rental car in the morning, a Chrysler Victory so new it smelled like the ink on a dollar bill, and headed north. The day was clear with a high, blue sky the color of cornflowers; Wolgast drove while Doyle sipped his latte and read the file, a mass of paper resting on his lap.
“Meet Anthony Carter,” Doyle said, and held up the photo. “Subject Number Twelve.”
Wolgast didn’t want to look. He knew just what he’d see: one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely ever learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long. These men were black or white, fat or thin, old or young, but the eyes were always the same: empty, like drains that could suck the whole world down into them. It was easy to sympathize with them in the abstract, but only in the abstract.
“Don’t you want to know what he did?”
Wolgast shrugged. He was in no hurry, but now was as good a time as any.
Doyle slurped his latte and read: “Anthony Lloyd Carter. African American, five foot four, a hundred and twenty pounds.” Doyle looked up. “That explains the nickname. Take a guess.”
Already Wolgast felt tired. “You’ve got me. Little Anthony?”
“You’re showing your age, boss. It’s T-Tone. T for ‘Tiny,’ I’m thinking, though you never know. Mother deceased, no dad in the picture from day one, a series of foster homes care of the county. Bad beginnings all around. A list of priors but mostly petty stuff, panhandling, public nuisance, that kind of thing. So, the story. Our man Anthony cuts this lady’s lawn every week. Her name is Rachel Wood, she lives in River Oaks, two little girls, husband’s some big lawyer. All the charity balls, the benefits, the country clubs. Anthony Carter is her project. Starts cutting her lawn one day when she sees him standing under an overpass with a sign that says, HUNGRY, PLEASE HELP. Words along those lines. Anyway, she takes him home, makes him a sandwich, puts in some calls and finds him a place, some kind of group home she raises money for. Then she calls all her friends in River Oaks and says, Let’s help this guy, what do you need done around the place? All of a sudden she’s a regular Girl Scout, rallying the troops. So the guy starts cutting all their lawns, pruning the hedges, you know, all the things they need around the big houses. This goes on about two years. Everything’s hunky-dory until one day, our man Anthony comes over to cut the lawn, and one of the little girls is home sick from school. She’s five. Mom’s on the phone or doing something, the little girl goes out into the yard, sees Anthony. She knows who he is, she’s seen him plenty of times, but this time something goes wrong. He frightens her. There’s some stuff here about maybe he touched her, but the court psychiatrist is iffy on that. Anyway, the girl starts screaming, Mom comes tearing out of the house, she’s screaming, everybody’s screaming, all of a sudden it’s like a screaming contest, the goddamn screaming Olympics. One minute he’s the nice man who shows up on time to cut the lawn, next thing you know, he’s just a black guy with your kid, and all the Mother Teresa shit goes out the window. It gets physical. There’s a struggle. Mom somehow falls or gets pushed into the pool. Anthony goes in after her, maybe to help her, but she’s still screaming at him, fights him off. So now everybody’s wet and yelling and thrashing around.” Doyle looked at him quizzically. “Know how it ends?”
“He drowns her?”
“Bingo. Right there, right in front of the little girl. A neighbor heard it all and called the cops, so when they get there, he’s still sitting on the edge of the pool, the lady floating in it.” He shook his head. “Not a pretty picture.”
Sometimes it was troubling to Wolgast, how much energy Doyle put into these stories. “Any chance it was an accident?”
“As it happens, the victim was on the varsity swim team at SMU. Still did fifty laps every morning. The prosecution made a lot of hay with that little detail. That and the fact that Carter pretty much admitted to killing her.”
“What did he say when they arrested him?”